adr-sml/docs/04-seo-spec.md

04 — Discoverability

The problem this project exists to fix. AGENTS.md §2 has the measurements: a server-side fetch of the live site returns three words.

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The baseline being replaced

	Now [verified 2026-08-25]	Target
Content in server HTML	SML Company · DISPUTE RESOLUTION · Unpacking...	Every word
Indexable pages	1	17 + articles (19 fixed URLs, less the two /legal/* pages, which are noindex and excluded from the sitemap)
<title>	SML Company · Dispute Resolution — pre-rebrand placeholder	Unique per page
Meta description	none	Unique per page
<meta viewport>	absent	Present
Canonical URL	none	Every page
OG / Twitter tags	none	Every page
Structured data	none	Person, ProfessionalService, Article, FAQ, Breadcrumb
robots.txt	403	Served
Sitemap	none	Generated at build
Favicon	none	Full set

Astro's static output solves most of this by existing. The rest is the spec below.

Why static output matters more than usual here

Google can sometimes render client-side JavaScript. Bing largely does not. LinkedIn's preview crawler does not. Slack's unfurler does not. And the crawlers behind AI assistants — increasingly how counsel and in-house teams find a neutral — generally do not.

A site that requires three CDN round trips and an in-browser Babel compile before producing a sentence is invisible to all of them. That is the whole argument for D1.

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Metadata

Every page passes through one SEO component. A page without it is not finished.

title            50–60 chars, unique. Pattern: "<Page> · Pouya Lajevardi"
                 Home: "Pouya Lajevardi · Mediation & Arbitration · Toronto"
                 ARTICLES ARE THE EXCEPTION: no " · Pouya Lajevardi" suffix.
                 The suffix is 18 chars, so a headline that already reads
                 50–60 renders at 68–78 — over this ceiling. Measured against
                 the five launch headlines in 03-content-spec.md, the suffix
                 rule fails 5 of 5; without it, 4 of 5 pass. An article's
                 headline IS its <title>; `seoTitle` in the frontmatter
                 overrides it when a headline that reads well is out of range.
                 src/content.config.ts enforces this and names the offending
                 string and its length in the build error.
description      140–160 chars, unique, written for a human, not stuffed
canonical        absolute, https, trailing slash
og:title/description/image/url/type/site_name/locale  (en_CA)
twitter:card     summary_large_image
robots           index,follow — except /legal/* which is noindex,follow

OG images: 1200 × 630. Generate at build with satori or astro-og-canvas using the site's own type and palette. One template: display headline on cream, infinity mark, designation line. Never a screenshot.

Structured data

JSON-LD only. Validate against Google's Rich Results Test before cutover.

Type	Where	Notes
Person	/about/, referenced site-wide	name, jobTitle, description, alumniOf (Bond University), knowsLanguage (en, fa), hasCredential (Q.Med), sameAs (LinkedIn), image. jobTitle = "Director of Firm Operations"; omit worksFor — populating it either names the boutique (D16) or misstates the employer
ProfessionalService	Home	areaServed Toronto/Ontario, serviceType Mediation/Arbitration, provider → Person, priceRange once /fees/ is real. Never LegalService — schema.org defines it as a business providing legal advice and representation, which asserts in machine-readable form exactly what D13 bars and §4 Forbidden calls out
Service	Each practice page	serviceType, provider → Person, areaServed
Article	Each article	headline, description, datePublished, dateModified, author → Person, image
BreadcrumbList	All nested pages	Matches visible breadcrumbs
FAQPage	/for-parties/, /med-arb/	Only where the visible page genuinely is Q&A. Never fabricate questions to farm a rich result

hasCredential must reflect reality. Q.Med is held. Q.Arb is not. Marking an unheld credential as held in structured data is a misrepresentation that happens to be machine-readable.

Crawlability

public/robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /legal/

Sitemap: https://adr.smlcompany.ca/sitemap-index.xml

Do not block AI crawlers. Being read by an assistant that a general counsel is using to shortlist neutrals is the point.

Sitemap: @astrojs/sitemap, excluding /legal/* and any draft: true article. Submit to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools at cutover.

Internal linking. Every practice page links to /mediation/ and /arbitration/; those link back to the practice areas; every article links to at least one practice page. This is what turns Insights into ranking power for the pages that convert. Breadcrumbs on every nested page.

404 page. Real, styled, with search-intent links out. CloudFront must return it with a genuine 404 status — not a 200, which the S3 website-endpoint pattern gets wrong by default.

Performance

Core Web Vitals are a ranking input, and the current build fails all of them.

Metric	Budget
LCP	< 2.0 s, Slow 4G
CLS	< 0.05
INP	< 150 ms
JS per route	< 100 KB
Lighthouse (mobile)	≥ 95 all four categories

How: static HTML, self-hosted preloaded subset fonts, AVIF/WebP with explicit dimensions, critical CSS inlined, no third-party scripts on any page except the booking embed on /contact/ — and that one is lazy-loaded behind a click.

Local and professional presence

Not code, but it belongs in the launch checklist: Google Business Profile for the practice; ADRIC and ADRIO directory listings pointing at the site; a LinkedIn profile whose headline and Featured section match the brand (brief §VIII); consistent name, address, and phone across all of them.

Post-launch verification

• curl -s https://adr.smlcompany.ca/ | grep -c "<h1" returns ≥ 1
• Every page renders its full text with JavaScript disabled
• Rich Results Test passes on Person, ProfessionalService, Article
• OG preview renders correctly in LinkedIn Post Inspector and Slack
• Sitemap submitted to Google Search Console and Bing
• No page returns 200 for a URL that should 404
• Lighthouse ≥ 95 mobile on /, /about/, one practice page, one article